Kakao to build mega-sized data center in university campus

SEOUL -- Kakao, a major major web service company in South Korea, will build a big data center at a university campus in a southwestern satellite city of Seoul to cope with an increase in data traffic. Construction will begin next year for completion by the end of 2023.

A data center is an all-in-one infrastructure for data storage servers, communication and network equipment and computing devices. Data centers are considered the key aspect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution Technology that requires a super-fast data connection and powerful computing capabilities.

The Gyeonggi provincial government said in a statement on September 7 that Kakao, Hanyang University and Ansan City signed an agreement to build a data center in Hanyang University's Erica Campus in Ansan. 

According to Kakao, the data center will house a total of 120,000 data servers with a total storage capacity of six exabytes which is six billion gigabytes. The data center will be built next to a science research complex to fully exert its computing and data processing capabilities.

South Korea with an advanced cable and wireless internet communication network consumed a monthly average of more than 122 exabytes in 2017, according to data released by Cisco Korea, the South Korean branch of American tech company Cisco Systems. The monthly average traffic is expected to exceed 396 exabytes in 2022.

A steady increase in traffic generated by internet and smartphone users watching high-definition video content prompted service operators, internet companies and mobile carriers to build data centers.